Trump and America’s Dark Underside

Rasa - German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that Europe can no longer rely on the United States to impose order worldwide, and that European nations need to be ready to take matters into their own hands.

News ID: 438779

Date: 22 July 2018 - 23:05

RNA - The same argument could be made by the rest of the international civil society in these contemporary times. Poll after poll shows the US to be more self-interested than altruistic with President Donald Trump at the White House. Whether on the topic of humanitarian intervention, or fighting terrorism, or promoting democracy, the Trump White House is not very supportive of these policy goals if significant costs are involved.

In the abstract, the US government may express liberal views supportive of universal human rights. But this is the same country with a demonstrable history of ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery and lynching, racist laws to exploit and repress African Americans, periodic isolationism and xenophobia, grinding poverty under a harsh form of capitalism, disastrous regime-change wars, and a host of other defects.

More still, the election of President Trump has both reinforced the dark underside of American society, giving it unprecedented divisive voice on the world stage, and moved to destroy the world order. It is perfectly clear that Trump has never heard of hegemonic stability theory, nor has he entertained the notion that America requires sensitivity to the independence of others as compared to voiding international deals and a selfish grabbing of whatever there is to grab.

His poorly conceived travel ban affected maybe 90,000 Muslims with no security gains, while it certainly did damage to US foreign policy interests. The same argument could be made about his decision to void the Iran nuclear deal and wage a self-defeating global trade war with Europe, Canada and China.

One outcome after 2016 has to be the death knell of so-called American exceptionalism, or hegemony, or respect. The rhetoric of “making America great again” is being joined by such mean-spirited policies toward European allies, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Muslims, and those of differing opinions of all types.

No doubt with Trump at the White House, the so-called American exceptionalism or global hegemony is disintegrating. The US finds itself struggling with its place in the world. Trump’s decision to turn his back on America’s allies and the international civil society may well have helped him to capture the votes of most white men and about half of white women. But that’s all really.

These are the Americans who are angry that their privileges are not what they used to be, who were frightened by those others - people on the coasts, in the cities, people with brown or black skin who speak languages other than English, people who worship at mosques or temples. For them, a woman following a black man into power did not represent progress; it represented another attack on their white America.

According to Fars News Agancy, the new trade war or rhetoric that is posited as a travel ban on Muslims, a proposed Muslim registry and the possible internment of Muslim citizens buttresses Trump’s worldview of American exceptionalism. All humanity, not just Americans, need to recognize that the hatred, fear, bigotry and ignorance being propagated by the current leadership in Washington are the same malignant values resuscitated from the dustbin of history, and recently on regional display in Israel – the Jewish state law.

Such values are a sad reminder of a time when demonization of Jews nearly extinguished their civilization in Europe. It is thus an act of irony that it is Palestinians and Muslims - who through their compassion, inspired by the Holy Quran that they used as their moral compass then as they do today - provided sanctuary to the persecuted Jews, yet are being murdered, vilified and propagandized as an existential threat to the “Jewish state and even to the rest of humanity.

In Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19, he excoriated Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela for wide-ranging “evil activities” but did little to persuade the world body that America’s racism and endless wars are not a monumental problem; and that Saudi-Israeli allies are not in an on-stage “live” genocide of defenseless civilians in Yemen and Palestine.

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